Once pacifist Japan may be doing some old-fashioned saber rattling off the coast of North Korea by dispatching ships and planes to monitor the possible long-range missile launch from Comrade Kim’s Paradise of Paranoia and Starvation. Reassuringly, according to the AP:
Senior Vice Foreign Minister Yasuhisa Shiozaki said, however, that Japan had “encountered no information” indicating North Korea had the technology to put a nuclear warhead on a missile.
“It requires tremendous technology to miniaturize an atomic weapon in order to load into a missile warhead,” he said.
Now what country, I wonder, has that? [Maybe Kim should hire Sony. They're great at miniaturizing.-ed. Better yet, maybe Sony should buy North Korea.]
I can think of a couple of high tech countries that just might have miniature nukes… well… actually, all the pieces just not at the momoent fitted together.
Can we say Japan and Taiwan?
On the other hand, the Japanese have a very deep cultural loathing for nuclear weapons (I can’t even discuss the subject with my Americanized Japanese sister in law, for example).
We shall see.
Seriously speaking, Japan have the technology and the material to make not just nukes, but nukes armed on ICBM, and it wouldn’t even take them that long if they’re serious about it. All that’s preventing them from getting one is lack of will.
Yeah. Japan has the technology (nuclear and rocket) and the plutonium production to drop a hydrogen bomb anywhere on Earth. The only question is how much time it would take them to launch, which merely involves much prep assembly they’ve already done.
At the longest, Japan is six months from having a working nuclear-armed ICBM from the moment they decide they need one. At the shortest, they might actually have a handful that are mere days of preparation from launch.
Taiwan and South Korea don’t have space launcher tech, so they have fighter-delivered nukes on the same “at worst six months” timeframe of Japan.